Retail Ventures

Retail Ventures, Inc. was the Columbus, Ohio holding company created in 2003 for three Schottenstein-family retail businesses: DSW, the off-price shoe chain; Filene's Basement; and Value City Department Stores. The group had gone public in 1991 under the Value City name, bought DSW in 1998 and Filene's Basement in 2000, and traded on the New York Stock Exchange as RVI. Retail Ventures sold most of Value City in 2008, and on May 26, 2011 it merged into its own subsidiary DSW — each RVI share converted into 0.435 DSW shares — ending the holding company and its listing.

Company Profile

The record in this page is two dated announcements rather than a summary, and both are disposals: the January 23, 2008 disposition of an 81% interest in Value City Department Stores to a VCHI Acquisition consortium, with a new $100 million Filene's Basement credit facility, and the February 2011 announcement of the DSW merger. Between them, Retail Ventures unwound itself — first the department stores, then the holding-company layer itself.

What survived was DSW, by then the group's value: 259 stores at the 2008 announcement, plus shoes supplied to 342 locations of other retailers. The 2011 merger simplified the structure the market had discounted — a listed parent owning a listed subsidiary — and DSW, today Designer Brands, carries the continuing stock record of the whole Schottenstein retail group.

The range behind the name is off-price footwear at DSW and general merchandise at Value City and Filene's Basement. Its customers are value shoppers in major metropolitan and small-town markets across the United States. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Retail Ventures in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Retail Ventures with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

Because Retail Ventures no longer operates independently, there is no current company website to link from the snapshot, and enquiries that would once have gone to its head office belong with the successor named in the status line — or, where the business closed entirely, the record here is the end of the trail. The dated summaries remain useful to researchers precisely because the company can no longer update its own account of itself.

For anyone researching the fashion industry's public-company era, Retail Ventures is a useful case: a holding company that merged into its own subsidiary. The summaries in this section were compiled while the story was still unfolding, which is exactly what makes them worth keeping — they preserve what the company said about itself at the time, before the outcome was known.